O is for Orange Tip

Finally got some shots of the Orange Tipped butterfly, I've seen quite a few this spring, but this was the only one who'd sit still long enough to let me get a shot off.

He moved as I clicked the shutter, and I thought I'd missed him, he did let me get quite a few closed shots, and to be honest, after all the trouble I've had getting the wing uppers, I think he's more beautiful closed, with his green and white camouflage.

And - Yes, I think that's his tongue in the lower picture!

H is for Hummer, Humvee, HMMWV, HumBug

The Hummer, which for some reason turned into Humvee (a slightly longer abbreviation?!) was based on the Lamborghini Cheeta, which Tamiya made a motorized kit of many years ago.

It has now been in use for 20+ years, and has had time to become a common plaything, with various accurate and not so accurate versions available. I posted the Supreme/SP Toys examples here a while ago, so lets look at some of the others...

Top to bottom, left to right;

Simply marked 'China' this hard topped troop carrier version is covered in markings, and looks like the sort of thing you'd find in a military parade somewhere in the Far-East. Next we have the Johnny Lightning/Playing Mantis open pick-up 'GS' version and was issued with a nice GMC pick-up in the same colour scheme. Another 'China' model finishes this row, an M966 TOW launcher.

These three are all by the same Chinese company, are much smaller than the others at around 1:87/1:90 scale, they are also quite crude models.

The bottom row starts with another Chinese model, a soft-topped GS, again covered in markings, most imaginary! Finally the two variations of the Hornby Railways Hummer as issued in the Battle Zone play-set. They are the only all-plastic ones in this line-up. [They are to be re-issued this year (2010) in the same play-set but with a new name; 'CODENAME STRIKEFORCE']

Finally - a few versions of the modern - made in HK/China - Matchbox Hummers, one civilianized as an H1 Hummer (not called a Humvee? even though Mattel have called it so on the box!), although using the same moulding as the military versions, along with three paint variants of the M966 TOW vehicle. Two with quite good US desert camouflage, and one in a sort of Giraffe pattern! These all came from Tesco over a couple of years for about 99p each.

The figure used for scale, is a new Chinese piracy of recent Revell production, being a 30mm copy of a 23mm American soldier.

S is for Sobres - Montaplex Wild West Sets

As I was looking at pocket-money Wild West stuff the other night I thought it'd be a good time to cover these; Spanish Sobres, sold - like Hong Kong carded stuff - from corner shops, tobacconists and the little street kiosks you still get in the wider boulevards of some European city's.

The main producer and certainly the first to get wider coverage outside Spain, with the fledgling internet (HaT in particular covered these in the early days of their website) and Plastic Warrior (have you subscribed yet?) was Montaplex. Among the many sets they produced were a bunch of Wild West Forts, one being this Fort Apache, clearly it's loosely based on the eponymous Airfix Fort, with the raised quarters in the top left-hand corner as you view the gates, the lookout tower has been omitted,but...see below!

One figure is missing from the figure sprue having been mis-moulded, well, not moulded at all, but his scalp is just about present on the end of the branch!

Two slightly different designs of Fort Cheyen (Spanish for Cheyenne), and Lo!..the tower from the Airfix Fort Apache!, otherwise these are basically copies of the Hong Kong Fort Cheyenne's, the raging battle on the packet artwork leads to great disappointment when you open it to find two small and rather wooden wagons, unless you have a soft spot for small wagons, like me!

In the upper shot, we are looking at - from left to right - a Hobby-plast wagon, the two Montaplex wagons from the above set, and a wagon from a 1990's release by BuM ('Boom' in English apparently, although the fact their racing car system is called BuM-Slot, leads one to suspect an British hand at the tiller somewhere?), it's obvious that all three in the front row are identical, so the suspicion's are that Hobby-plast and Montaplex were either the same company, or buying-in stock from an independent source, and that further; BuM started life clearing the old stock from these two, before getting into less ethical stuff...frowns! I see Pirates!

In the lower picture a Montaplex fire engine - loosely based on the old Matchbox design but with astronauts as crew (One crew member is missing). [The proper place for the astronaut; Moonbase ]

H is for Hobby-plast - Wild West

More Sobres, this time from Hobby-plast, they have a lot of items in common with Montaplex, but also seem to have some unique items. The addresses on the backs of the packets (which are generally - with these two companies - thin, A5, printed envelopes, sealed until bought) would suggest the same company parentage. However there may have been different sorces, or marketing stratagies for the two arms?

This set contains the common stage coach in HO'ish scale, but accompanies that with 54mm pirates of Airfix cowboys, these are reasonable as copies go, certainly as good as Hong Kong ever gets!

Three more sets from Hobby-plast, the right hand set in the upper picture comes with twice the contents as laid out, while the left hand set gets one of the same sprues and a wagon. These figures are copies of the Airfix Ho/00 High Chaparral/Cowboys and Indians

The bottom set has to be one of the most disappointing ever, once you open it! No bucking bronco's, no clowns in barrels, no bulls...just the worst copies of 54mm Cowboys and Indians I've ever seen, they make 99% of all Hong Kong production look 'well detailed', although the horses are quite good in comparison with most HK hollow horses.

A is for Alamo, Fort Alamo

And how nice to find a model fort from the 1960's/70's that's not called Apache or Cheyenne, pity it looks nothing like THE Alamo! Made by Muri, and bought in Naples, Italy in the Summer of '69 this is a simple clip-together hard styrene fort with soft plastic/ethylene flats of the sort the Spanish were putting in their 'sobres' at around the same time.

Various views of the fort, because this is a border-line 'lazy post' (late at night, nearest thing to hand I haven't already covered - but more images than a standard lazy post!), I had trouble with the photo's so had to do a collage, as all the whole-fort views were orange again.

It's these new 'green' bulbs, the light is very odd and hard to photograph under, it also creates colour variants among my Airfix figures which disappear in the morning! Try it? Get a bunch of the old 54mm Marines, from more than one source, and watch some of them go bright green under these new bulbs?!

The various soft plastic components and the card, this was a header-bagged rack-toy, the flag is a simple doubled up piece of insulation tape with that sticky white goo one remembers from printed Christmas parcel tape of the period! The number could be twentieth in a series, or the first of a range that only ran to one? anyone know if other Muri stuff exists?

Continuing tonight's themes - Flats, Wild West and untypical production for the nation concerned comes this little bag from Hong Kong, the Plastic Set No. 101 contains hard plastic flats (uncommon for HK) with splashes of gold and silver paint (more like it!), and hasn't been decanted in case I don't find another.

I used to decant/un-sprue/remove packaging, but now I only do so if I have a second one to keep mint, or if it's post the year 2000 in which case it's never going to be 'rare' in the old sense of the word.

There are some purely coincidental similarity's between the Indian poses in the two sets, another reason I did them together and made a lazy-post into a proper post! [Just reviewing my past articles on flats and realised that not only is there a passing resemblance between the HK Indian poses and several of the Gibbs Indians, but at least one is a direct copy!]

D is for Dragon, on St George's Day

Or, it would have been St George's Day if Picasa hadn't mucked me about until after midnight!

Mc is for McSomebody-or-other?!

Looking for help with these. Marked LF Mc 1973 or 1974, for years I thought they were McEwan, only because the 'Mc' couldn't easily be applied to anyone else and I knew he'd done Sci-Fi figures in his Starguard series. Anyway the other day I thought I'd sort the question out once and for all and had a quick look on Google, well the first thing was the names don't match, the figures are marked LF and McEwan is J for John.

Left to right; Minifigs Mystical Earth; ME100 Cetaur, ME101 Pan;
Science Fiction; SF3 Aquila Death Angel, SF 4 Vertos Robotic, SF8 Aquila Starman.

So next thing was to contact Mr. McEwan and see if he knew anything about a similar range from the same period by a McSomebodyelse....He kindly replied that....he didn't! So next stop; Lost Minis Wiki where it was going to take a lifetime to find them, likewise The Miniatures Page (TMP) was going to take three-and-a-half lifetimes!

In the meantime I had gone through the other 'Unknown Metal' boxes, thinking I had some similar ACW, I didn't! But I did have some Ancients, Medievals and Colonial Zulu's, two of which had a better mark...

Clockwise from top left; Egyptian foot soldiers, Roman archers, Lombard style crossbowman, mounted Samurai archer and Zulu's.

The horse and the Roman in green tunic are both marked 'Leonard Frances McQuirk', so who was he? and for whom did he sculpt? The complete lack of info. leads one to assume they were released by a better known 'name'? There is a McQuirk who's working/worked for the dreaded Games Workshop, but this is not their style, however he might have started out making well-proportioned figures before taking the path of the 'Dark Side'. Some of these also have earlier dates, 1971 and 1972.

Most of the figures are between 22 and 23 millimeters, however the two taller SF figures are closer to 25mm.

Any help greatly appreciated, and if we can get a definitive I.D. on these I'll get them uploaded to the lost figures Wiki in order that they don't get lost again. One of the problems with both 'Lost' and 'TMP' is that they are listed by maker, someone with some time on their hands needs to start something for metals like PSR, that can be searched thematically as well as alphabetically? A mammoth task I'm not volunteering for!

PS - Can anyone suggest a source for the metallic pink/mauve used on the Sci-Fi 'Witch-doctor'? It's not Humbrol or GW, it's a gloss, and I suspect it's a colour-matched Railway livery by Gloy, Joy or Precision or some similar brand?

Xaltotun of Python from Kingdoms of Antiquity has identified the Egyptian as Minifigs 'S' range, but thinks they may have been marked by the owner?

And I've now found the SF stuff on Lost Minis as Minifigs, see designations above.

Y is for You Can't Play Without Them

P is for Parachute and Special Force Insignia

What to send to those idiots in Berkina Faso...

B is for Budgie Toys

Budgie were a maker of die-cast toy cars and the like in the 1950's and 60's, but they also produced a 'Wagon Train' boxed play-set, with three of these wagons and some outriders fixed into a large box.

Top are the three poses of wagon puller, they can have a receiving-hole for the draw-bar drilled into either flank, and come in the three browns shown and white. Bottom left are the outriders, one figure pose, two horses. Bottom right shows a complete wagon with rider. I think there was a female pose as well, sitting for the wagon, but don't have one.

These are beginning to suffer greatly from metal fatigue and usually have cracks in the body or tilt/cover/canopy, broken barrels, wheels etc and no locating-studs on the tilt, which can be found wedged in the wagon body. The figures were clearly designed by the same sculptor who did the Airfix Cowboys, Indians and other early sets (some argument whether it was Stadden or Nibblet, I veer toward Stadden), or someone copying his style closely, also the shades of brown are similar to Airfix and the Blue of the figures is the same blue Airfix was using around the same time for its soft-plastic (dime-store copy) motorcycle dispatch rider/motor mechanic, so maybe they supplied the plastic elements to Budgie...pure conjecture.

Went for a walk....

Well given the glorious spring weather and the beautifully quiet skies today (thank you 'Mount Unpronounceable'), I went for a quick walk at lunchtime, camera in hand.

Loved this twisted log, looks like it's fossilized already!

Another of my favorite Polyanthus, this is a hybrid gold-laced one which had been planted outside a back gate to the woods.

Closer to home, our Magnolia is bursting into life now.

R is for Round The Bend!

One of my long-term plans is to reproduce the old Waddington's board game 'Formula 1' as a wooden inlaid coffee-table top. I think the game was also called Grand-Prix at one time and Ravensburger had a Grand Prix with 6 teams of three cars.

I also want to scale it up, so that there is room for 8 teams of two cars instead of the standard 6 teams of one. Scaling should be easy as Waddington's scaled it down for their pocket set 'Pit Stop' in the House of Games series. All I should have to do is work out the scaleing and reverse scale beyond the original to the point where I have a wider track and 8 pits! Ultimately there would be a faster racing-line with semi-fast lines either side, and rule tweaks to enable more pitting over longer races.

As a result I'm collecting micro-cars to make up the teams, I haven't decided whether to paint-up pairs, or wait until I get 8 similar coloured pairs? This is what I have so far and while Green, Red, Yellow and Blue are all well served, Grey, Black and Orange are looking poor, although - typically - just after I took these, a parcel arrived from Bill over at Moonbase Central with a beautiful Grey Jaguar similar to the old Lone*Star treble-o die-cast, but in plastic, so I just need a Black and Orange still.

Top Photo - L-R; 2 from Kinder; 3 from Grand-Prix (?); A colour variant, small space car (?) in yellow, and two slightly different versions of an early racing car, a blue Cellulose-acetate one and a green die-cast one, probably from early board games; The 4 cars from the Pit Stop set, although Boardgamegeek shows this moulding in 6 colours in some editions of Formula 1.

Bottom Photo has the Formula 1 cars in the first two rows, and then cars from two other board games, the first two possibly from a different issue of Pit Stop (?). The final two might be an early issue of Grand-Prix (?) and are plastic copies of the Monopoly car already on this blog somewhere.

Boardgamegeek fails to deliver when trying to ascribe these cars as it has several duplicate entries, and both F1 and GP are common to to many games, with lots of other car race and touring games over the years!

F is for Flats, unknown Flats

[Was being a tired (lazy) git last night and have edited the text and retaken the photo's!]

I've been meaning to show the first of tonight figures for a while, as they have been appearing on eBay a lot recently, and present a mystery or two. However in getting them out encountered the second lot, which seem to go together - after a fashion - so here they both are...

I'd always thought these were unusual (I've only ever seen the one pose?), similar to some early Marx or Thomas with the flat feet and solid construction, and they do pop up on eBay quite a lot, I've seen a bottle-green one (as I was bidding on the brown one) and there was a red-brown one on last week but in a junk lot at a 4.99 start price, which - not unsurprisingly - went unsold for the third or forth time.

Anyway, when I saw the metal one back in Jan. I thought, 'Oh Wow, they're taken from an old Hollow-cast mould', but with nothing in Joplin, bid 'blind' and waited with baited breath (that's a bit over-dramatic for a 99p lot in the post!) and was interested when it arrived to find in was a solid (probably why it's not in Joplin!).

Still believing it was the original, I was even more surprised to find it's quite a bit smaller, and must - in fact - be a home-cast (or commercial) copy of the plastic one! So...who, where, when? For either the metal or plastics! The plastic is a real UNA/VP/Kentoys colour?

The figure on the right is a mismould, taken out while still too hot, he has contracted forwards, but has still made a reasonably usable figure/pose variant. Metal figure is 70mm, the plastic 72mm.

[Peter Evans has identified these as being by Li-lo, which means the metal one is almost certainly a home-cast copy, if they keep turning up on eBay, I'll flag them as a dodgy set-up!]

Looking for the British 'Tommy' led me to the box 'Unknown Flats - Military', where the next biggest are these 65mm hollow-backed German 'Fritz' characters, I'm guessing they were from lucky-bags, or a shooting game? It's only a guess, anybody have any idea on these chaps from the wilder fringe of Toy Soldiers?

[20th Nov. 2015 - They were branded KM, came with a spring-loaded pull-back action pistol and six orange ball projectiles, blistered on a card, they are targets in a shooter game! The 'Combat Force Military Action Gun Set']

[2018 - now known to be Kwong Ming Plastics Pty.]

A is for Addict, Toy Soldier Addict.

What follows is a sorry tale first published on the HaT Forum under a thread titled " Toy Soldier Collectors Anonymous " started by Patrick Deck on the 6th July 2008, it is sobering reading and apart from a bit of a spell check and the odd tweak remains unchanged...

My name is Hugh and I'm an addict, I started light, the same way most do, you know....the odd Airfix "because I had them as a kid", but I mixed Esci to match, then Revell teased me from the back of Concord Models, it was late on a Friday night, I was tired, vulnerable, I had an overtime payment in my pocket, it was too easy. I'd barely tasted the full flavour of the new mouldings when there was A-Toys packaging all over the place, I didn't care they were the same as Esci, I 'needed' them all, looking back it's easy to see; I was hooked already. But even if I wasn't, it was too late. I entered that years BMSS show in Aldershot (a Fujimi SdKfz 222 and Scratch-built 221), some guy in the bar got talking to me - he saw me coming - "Pop up to my place in Hartfordshire, I've got some Atlantic you can have", I was a fool, less than two weeks later I had a car-boot full of it. It gets worse, it always gets worse...I discovered premiums, I was getting them as chasers for the other stuff, started safe'ish, with a little bit of Kellogg's and some Nabisco but it wasn't long before I was hitting-on to Ola, Tito and those strong French one's, then came the German Flats (Andreas Dittman pushed those to me!), I wanted more, there were more, 300 companies. Andy Harfield and Peter Bergner kept supplying me with cheap gear, then I found quality stuff from Giant; 'Blues' & 'Greys', followed them with well-cut pirate junk from their brothers in Hong Kong, it was spiraling out of control, some weekends I'd take so much I couldn't fit it all in, I had to start an 'Unsorted recent purchase' stash in the back room, then another, then another. The names, Almark, Subbuteo, Blue Box (she had several sisters and was related to Marx, he had connections to Dunby Combex and through them Triang, Minix, Frog eventually - via Hornby - back to Airfix but I didn't care, I'd take 'em twice), then the new ones, HaT, Imex and Pegasus from the States, Emhar, Accurate and ACTA from nearer home, then the 'Eastern Promise' of Odemars, Orion, Strelets*R and LW via the mystery of Kervella/HYTTY, but I was beyond help, I'm on the hard stuff now....Chas Stadden, Comet/Authenticast, Wille/Suren, Ral Partha, McEwan, Hinchliffe, et al....and real gut-rot; Games Workshop, Marauder, Mini-figs........The Horror!..........the horror!............

It is unknown what happened to the chap, but I fear deliverance eludes him to this day...